


Anchor

by betweenthepages



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Friendship/Love, Hurt/Comfort, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 23:35:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betweenthepages/pseuds/betweenthepages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Phil Coulson thought he'd lost Melinda May, and the one time he did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anchor

1.

The first time they'd partnered up, it had been in a strategic game designed by the Academy to test its second year students. The objective was to retrieve an object from a heavily guarded cabin in the forest, while teams of "operatives" tried to take them out. 

They've been in the woods for two hours, defending each other's backs in silence, when she speaks to him for the first time. "Do you trust me?" she asks, her dark eyes serious. To his surprise, he finds himself nodding. There was something about her -- the way she fought, the way she carried herself, that gave away no doubt. It was reassuring, and he admired that in her.

"Good. Then we're splitting up. Trust me." He hasn't even opened his mouth in protest before she slipped away through the trees.

When he hears a shout, his heart stops in his throat. He sprints to find her sprawled on the grass, facedown, still and silent. This was a training exercise, but that didn't mean people didn't get hurt. He hit his panic button, calling out to her.

As soon as the button is hit, the "operatives" guarding the cabin come running for them, their expressions full of concern. As they reach for her, she springs back up, taking all four of them down with ease.

The cabin is within view. Melinda May laughs. "You coming?" she throws over her shoulder at Phil, whose jaw had dropped. She'd played them all.

He runs to join her, vowing never to doubt her again.

On graduation day, they are sitting together when an older, brunette woman claps her hand on May's shoulder. "Well done," she says curtly, then walks away. Phil's jaw drops. "Was that...?"

"Peggy Carter, yes." Melinda smirks, but he can see the hint of a blush rising in her face. 

When it's their turn to walk, he balks. For a moment, the enormity of what was about to happen hit him. Melinda squeezed his hand, whispering "trust me." 

Still starry-eyed, the two walked the stage together.

2\. 

Phil felt like his head would explode. He'd spent the past month trying to get Natasha Romanoff cleared for field duty, and the last rejection had just come in with some excuse about her not being combat ready. He groaned.

When Melinda looked up from the desk over, she reaches into her desk to pour him a glass of Scotch, pointedly leaning over his shoulder as she places it in front of him.

The next day, when he notices agents not-so-sneakily leaving their desks and heading for the gym, he follows. His breath catches in his throat as he realizes why the room was so crowded.

In the center was Melinda May, his partner, not even thirty and already legendary for her combat and flight skills. Beside her, Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton's recruit, whose skills had spread only though whispers and rumors. The two women facing off on the mat, the room tense with anticipation.

When they engage, it's poetry in motion. Romanoff is all litheness and grace, May all precision and calculated power, but they were well-matched, moving as if the fight was choreographed. They move back and forth across the mat, anticipating each other's every move. For nine agonizing minutes they spar, the audience's jaw drops, and Phil holds his breath. 

Then May hits the ground and stills, Romanoff's hands around her neck. 

His world stops. 

Phil starts towards them unconsciously, held back only by the touch of Clint's hands. He'd never seen May go down in close combat, and as the audience drew in a collective breath, he realized that they never had, either.

To his surprise, Natasha very calmly climbs off May, holding out a hand to help her up. The two women take in the room, stances identical, chins ever so slightly raised as if in challenge. The audience clears, chattering excitedly in awe, leaving only Clint and Phil.

"That should do it," Melinda says, that familiar glint in her eyes. 

The next day, the sparring is all anyone could talk about. Within 24 hours, Natasha Romanoff was officially cleared for field duty.

When he returns to his office, he finds the bottle of wine he'd hidden in his closet open and empty on his desk. Beside it, two wine glasses sat, the barest lipstick marks still staining them. There's a note.

"You're welcome," it reads. He could swear Melinda May actually winked at him.

3.

Clint and Natasha had always made the choice look so clear cut, but in reality, it was rarely so. So often the question in SHIELD was not so much whether you were willing to make the sacrifice play -- most people were -- but whether you were willing to let your partner make it. The world or your partner. A choice agents prayed they'd never have to make. 

It wasn't even the world that was in the balance that day in Bahrain, just a nearby village and a handful of SHIELD agents at most. He could almost see the wheels in Melinda's mind turning as the situation escalated. 

When it's down to the two of them, she starts to head in. When he raises his gun and starts to follow her, she shakes her head. "Trust me," she says, walking away from him. 

He'd chosen the world, but when she walks out of that warehouse and he sees the look in her eyes, he'd give anything to go back in time and choose his partner. 

He spends days by her bed in the medical bay, weeks sitting outside her apartment, months dropping off coffee at her desk everyday. When she finally requests that transfer to administration, when she looks at him without even the barest glimmer in her eyes as she packs up the half of the office they'd shared for years, he let her go.

He still had the wheel-wells of all Boeings flying from Newark to Singapore checked everyday, though, just in case.

Years later, when he's slumped against the wall of the Helicarrier bleeding to death, he thinks of how if anyone understood his choices on that day, it would be Melinda May.

(And it was. Which is why, unbeknownst to him, she had designated herself responsible for telling the Cellist of his death. She'd wanted her to remember Phil as the hero he always was, and for that, it took someone who understood choices -- and the people that let you make them.)

4\. 

If there was anything Phil was grateful for about his resurrection, it's that him coming back to life seemed to ignite some embers deep within Melinda, too. Which is why when he can't sleep, he pads up to the cockpit with the files, to find the one person who would understand.

She gestures wordlessly at the empty chair in the cockpit, and flips the switch for autopilot. "Can't sleep?" she asks sympathetically.

"I just... don't know what's real anymore." His voice wavers as he hands her the file, the one filled with his medical reports, the photos of his surgery, records of how long he'd died.

She didn't even try to mask the look of horror on her face as she flipped through the photographs, and when she stands and leaves the cockpit, he wonders if this is what will shatter whatever faith Melinda May has left, if this is what will send her flying for a parachute and running from SHIELD.

He shouldn't have worried. She returns a few minutes later with a blanket that she tucks around him, stopping to press her lips against his forehead, where there should be scars from surgery. He hadn't been able to shake the tingling feeling there ever since he'd seen the photos, but as he calmed, he realized that there had always been something healing in Melinda's touch.

She hands him small, ornately carved wooden box. "To help you remember what's real," she states simply.

For the rest of the night, she tells him stories about the objects he pulls out of the box, starting with the SHIELD Academy tassel. She pores over the things that told their story with him, validating the details he adds, and by the time she starts talking about the wine cork he'd pulled out of the box, he's fast asleep at last, secure in the company of his old partner.

5.

Centipede had known exactly who to take. They hadn't taken Skye, or Ward, or Fitzsimmons, all of whom would have been easier to subdue and take. They'd taken Melinda May. His partner, his anchor. This wasn't a threat against SHIELD, or any threat to the world -- it was personal, a threat to him, pure and simple.

And now here he was, watching the video they'd sent him, of Melinda bound and gagged against a chair as a man traced patterns on her stomach with a knife. She's deliberately expressionless but attempts to shift her torso away from the camera, eyes betraying a hint of worry. Instruments are laid at her feet, and Phil shudders to think of what they could do to her.

Skye had found them within hours, and they were en route now. Ward was suiting up, Fitzsimmons programming the drones. They'd have her back soon.

And yet... the man's knife was tracing deeper and deeper patterns, and Melinda shifted even more, as if to block the camera from view. When the knife plunges in to her body once and she goes slack, Phil sees the pattern in full for the first time.

When he realizes they'd traced his scar onto her body, he scrambles for the trash can, emptying the contents of his stomach into it. Skye comes racing into the room, reaching for him, coming to a complete stop when she sees the screen. Ward, right on her heels, recovers first. Melinda's mouthing something and Skye springs into action, running the lip-reading software.

"Trust me." Phil's heart dropped.

When they finally reach where she's held, she's slumped back in a wooden chair in the middle of a room, everyone else lying still in the layer of water covering the floor. She weakly gestures at the flickering taser on the floor below her, indicating the electric current still running through the water.

When he has her in her arms at last, he looks down at her, bleeding out from the same wound that killed him. "Still with you," she whispers weakly, curling in against his chest.

Later, when she's stable, she doesn't object to Phil falling asleep with his head carefully tucked into the crook of her neck, her pulse a reminder that they were both alive.

(+1)

Even after Grant leaves to run his own team, after Fitzsimmons follow him, after Skye leaves to serve a mandatory stint with another team before becoming Level 6, Phil and Melinda stick together. It strikes them as quite ironic that while the team fell apart -- for the best of reasons, for the reason that they'd learnt as much as they possibly could from each other and it was simply time to move on -- they fell back together, getting to know each other all over again. 

While their team - their babies - saved the world, they spend days tracing each others scars, falling into a different kind of love, the kind that comes with decades of trust and partnership. 

It is the most ordinary of mornings when his world comes skidding to a stop. She was on her way out the door to SHIELD Academy; he off to HQ where he sometimes consulted. Both stopped when her phone rang with that special ringtone -- the one she couldn't ignore.

He knows it's fruitless to argue as she gathers up her flight gear, eyeing the storm out their window. "Blizzard," she mouths at him, taking down coordinates and briefing. They needed another pilot to shut down the storm and apprehend him. She was the only one with familiarity with the case.

On the news, chaos reigned. Phil wished she weren't headed right into the center of it.

She kisses him on the cheek as she leaves, smoothing out the crease of his brow. He watches her go, knowing that she wouldn't want to look back on this day and think that she could have done something.

When his phone begins buzzing frantically, he doesn't think anything of it. Then he turns to the news, footage of the storm calming, a suspect in custody. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a small plane falling, spiraling to the ground. He grabs for his phone. It's Skye.

"May's down."

The next hour passes in a blur, from the helicopter ride to the hospital, to the team reassembling, to doctors mumbling about brain death. He sees Jemma and Fitz's faces, that look of despair that came with being SHIELD's most accomplished scientists yet unable to do anything about this. He sees Ward silently leave only to return an hour later with Natasha and Clint, their faces carefully composed.

He hears Skye on the news, managing the press. Her stint as SHIELD's new press secretary had brought about a new era of transparency to the agency, and had he not known her, he would not have caught the waver in her voice as she spoke of the heroic efforts of one Agent Melinda May to stop the storm.

When he reaches for Melinda's hand, he'd have given anything for her to squeeze back. Their medical directives were identical. DNR. Organ donation. No extreme measures. 

He lets everyone say their goodbyes, then gestures for the doctors to turn off the machines. When she draws her final breaths, he is curled up by her side, one hand on her heart as it slows. When it stops beating at long last, he could swear his own stops too.

For a long time the room is still and silent, then Clint reaches over to lift him off the bed, bearing the brunt of his weight as his knees collapsed. Skye comes rushing in to support his other side, but he resists leaving the room until Ward steps up, his voice more serious than he's ever heard it. "I'll stay with her," he promises, as Natasha steps up next to him. "Until she's in the ground," she adds solemnly, reading his fear. Their faces are drawn with grief.

With one last kiss on the forehead, he let her go.

\----

He sees her everywhere in the months that follow, from the glint of someone's aviators to the sheen of leather jackets in the street. He sees her in the news, in the sky, in the planes that fly over their apartment. He sees her in Skye, who stops by frequently to check in on him. 

But most of all he saw her in the shapes of his scars, the ones she'd helped heal. He looked at them and saw her gentle touch, her fierceness, her steadfast loyalty.

He'd always known that Melinda May would save the world. He just didn't realize that she would save him too.

Fin.


End file.
